31 July 2016

I am unsure that the implicit insistence of the Church of England itself, since the 1990s, that Leo XIII was right to condemn Anglican Orders, quite ties up all the loose ends.

Although the Church of England was already moving in an unhealthy direction, when, in the 1950s it established partial communion with the interdenominational Church of South India, it at least did so with the proviso that only South Indian ministers who were episcopally ordained would be able to officiate in English Anglican churches. And when, in the late 1960s, the first attempt was made to do a corporate deal with the Methodists, there was at the basis of that scheme a service deliberately constructed to be an adequate Conditional Ordination of the Methodist ministers. I remember Eric Kemp, then Dean of Worcester, a competent canonist, explaining this very lucidly to the clergy of the diocese of Oxford. So there we had some sort of corporate and formal Anglican witness to the necessity for Catholic Order of episcopal Ordination. But this witness was one of the casualties of the following quarter century, as I demonstrated in my previous piece. Anglo-Catholics nevertheless claimed that, despite any misbehaviour of official Anglicanism, Anglican Orders were technically valid on Catholic grounds which had been ignored in Apostolicae curae. This claim received oblique support from an unusual quarter when sedevacantists argued that the principles of Apostolicae curae render doubtful or worse the Orders of the 'post-Conciliar Church'. Efforts to refute this thesis are hampered by the different interpretations which different Catholic writers have put upon the logic and argument of the bull.

And, since the bull Apostolicae curae there has been the Dutch Touch: the participation in Anglican Consecrations of Dutch schismatics with irreproachably valid orders and using a formula from the pre-Conciliar Roman Pontifical, the adequacy of which was strongly urged by none other than Cardinal Gasparri, the great Begetter of modern Canon Law.

The formal decision of S John Paul II, upon the advice of the CDF in the Leonard case, was to proceed on the basis that the 'Dutch Touch' rendered it no longer certain that Apostolicae curae still applied to the dutchified situation. This papal precedent cannot easily be treated as non-existent. A very distinguished and traditionalist Catholic theologian wrote to me, even before the Leonard decision, that the "applicability of its [Apostolicae curae] teaching to [Anglican] orders today is not itself unconditionally proposed by the contemporary Roman church" (emphasis original).

A factor of which few people seem to be aware is that the bull Apostolicae curae, in the text published in Acta Sanctae Sedis 29 (1896-7), explicitlylimited its scope to 'discipline', not doctrine. A distinguished Catholic theologian wrote to me that the ASS "is the official version of the text. ... However, in the collected edition of the Acta Leonis XIII the word is omitted ..." Dr E C Messenger wrote "The omission would seem to have been deliberate". It would be interesting to know who it was that contrived this deft and significant excision; my nominated suspect is Merry del Val, operating in the interests of Cardinal Vaughan, who perceived that the limitation could provide an opportunity to question the doctrinal force of the bull. There is something which is not quite kosher about these proceedings.

Some writers, both those ferociously arguing against Anglican Orders and sedevacantists ferociously denying the Orders of the 'Conciliar Church' as if their very lives depended upon it, give the impression that God has an eagle eye which he constantly has open to the possibility that there might be a technical detail rendering a sacrament invalid. I must confess to having quite the opposite suspicion. Sacramental grace, I think, is, by the Divine Will, rather like water ... perhaps like the flood water that just keeps getting into the homes of poor people in Somerset or Cumberland. It so often seems to find ways of seeping through or getting round the side, even despite the best attempts of human wilfulness to block it out. That, surely, is the basic and untechnical meaning of S Bellarmine's famous teaching on Intention, in which he demonstrates that even a heretic who believed that the [Calvinist] Church of Geneva was the True Church, could (given adequate Matter, Form, and Minister) validly confect the Sacraments. I accept, as the C of E now implicitly does, Leo XIII's general proposition that Anglican Orders have now to be categorised, at least and certainly juridically, as not identical to Catholic Orders. Official Anglicanism has made its bed, and individual Anglicans can hardly whinge if they are required to lie upon it. This does not, in my view, necessarily entail the proposition that no individual in the Anglican Ministry is truly a Catholic priest. The very evident signs of Sacramental Grace within Anglicanism might suggest otherwise. It might even indicate (another suggestion I have heard from a distinguished and traditional Catholic theologian) that Deus supplevit per desiderium.

But there can be no question that sacramental certainty needs to be secured and assured. The whole Anglican business has now become far too messy for this need to be fudged. And after all, it is not exactly the fault of the Catholic Church that there is so much confusion about the status of Anglican clergy. Rome never invited the Church of England to change the rites of ordination unilaterally in the sixteenth century; nor, in twentieth, to introduce women into the transmission of orders and to make endless public statements about the interchangeability of Anglican and Protestant ministries. Anglicans have a long history of wanting, not just to have things both ways, but of wanting to have everything in as many ways as it is possible to have them.

But what is to be done?

We are not the first to meet these problems. After his conversion, Newman "could not say that Anglican orders were invalid", and "I was surprised, when I got to Rome in 1846 to find various persons there in the belief that they were valid and none, I think, clear that they were not" (and this despite the assertion to be made in 1896 by Apostolicae curae that the matter had "iam pridem ab Apostolica Sede plene fuisse et cognitam et iudicatam"). His "difficulty" about being reordained was removed by the assurance that, although ordination would not be explicitly conditional, the 'condition' would be "implied ... in the Church's intention".

Conditional Ordination seems to me by far the most Catholic solution to this matter; Fr Aidan Nichols' original idea was the tactfully private rectification of the Orders of English Anglican priests seeking Full Communion. Since the diaconate does not impinge upon sacramental validity, diaconal ordination need not be part of the procedure; readers will recall that S John Paul II with his own hand struck out that provision in the draft documentation put before him for dealing with Bishop Graham Leonard. In other words, I suggest that the best process is exactly what Basil Hume, on instructions from Rome, did for Graham Leonard: Conditional Ordination to the Presbyterate well away from the public eye and in his private chapel.

(It may be remembered that this arrangement was the result of the CDF receiving copies of the entire Dutch Tutch archive from Pusey House, plus evidence about the theological views of the Anglican hierarchs involved in the processes leading from the Douch Touch up to Bishop Graham's presbyteral ordination; and sending it all to consultors whose vota formed the basis of the decision. Cardinal Hume subsequently said that other Anglican clergy who could provide identical documentation could expect to receive the same treatment ... but that the process would take very much longer than the abbreviated processes which were within the competences of the English Bishops. Anglican enquirers took the hint!)I felt that the very public 'Re-Ordinations' in places like Westminster Cathedral were indecorous, insulting to Anglicans, and had an unfortunate public appearance of rubbing their noses in it.

30 July 2016

I shall not consider any comments on this post until those interested have read the Footnote which I plan to print tomorrow.It was the view of pope Leo XIII that Anglican Orders were null and void, in the sense that they were not identical with the sacerdotal Orders which the Church considers herself to inherit from the Apostles. That is still the official juridical view of the Catholic Church.

What is often not noticed is that this is also now the view of the Church of England. Since the 1990s, the Church of England has entered into formal relationships with ecclesial bodies which undoubtedly lack Catholic Orders. The 'Porvoo' arrangement inserts her into the Porvoo Communion in which, even where there is a quasi-episcopal structure, that 'episcopate', in Norway and Denmark, can make no claim to Apostolic Succession (as Professor Tighe has demonstrated, the same is almost certainly true even of the Swedish Church, of which more optimistic judgements had previously been officially made by the Church of England). And ordinations in Scandinavia are not exclusively performed by Bishops (but sometimes by cathedral deans). (It is also worth looking at the published text of the Anglican-Methodist Covenant, in which, instead of even a perfunctory attempt to show that the Methodists believe the same as Anglicans about Holy Order, there is a cheerful assurance for Methodists that Anglicans don't believe anything different from Methodists.)

Faced with a very similar threat in the 1940s (at that time, the threat was posed by the 'CSI', a proposed pan-Protestant body called the Church of South India), Dom Gregory Dix, a robust defender of the validity of Anglican Orders, wrote: "As regards the question of Orders, what these proposals amount to is an official Anglican admission that Pope Leo XIII was right after all in his fundamental contention in Apostolicae Curae. In spite of face-saving phrases about 'the Apostolic Ministry' and the future confining of the act of Ordaining to men styled 'Bishops' [in fact, the Porvoo Scandinavians did not even undertake this], we would be committed to a formal declaration that by 'Bishops, Priests, and Deacons' could be meant only the new sixteenth-century conception of the Ministry disguised under the old titles ... And, whether we like it or not,that would be to justify Leo XIIIin the teeth of all our own past history. Thus, if these proposals were to be put into practice, the whole ground for believing in the the Church of England which I have outlined would have ceased to exist ... "

The other major Anglican theologian who mounted a persuasive defence of Anglican Orders was Dr Eric Mascall. He wrote: "When the preface to the Anglican ordinal declared that its purpose was the continuation of the threefold ministry which had existed 'from the Apostles' time', it was pointing to a concrete recognisable entity ... there was a lot to be said for avoiding theoretical statements ... and for pointing instead to the concrete reality which it was intended to perpetuate ... To the question 'what does ordination effect?' the fundamental answer is given ... by pointing to priests. ... defining it by telling you where it is and inviting you to go and look at it."

Well, the Church of England has, since the 1990s, certainly made quite a business of pointing to concrete realities and defining her views onpriesthood by telling us where it is and inviting us to go and look at it. And where her formal, synodical pointing finger points to is to Denmark and Norway and Sweden.

But Scandinavia is a long, long, long way ... well, perhaps not so very far away. But Scotland is undoubtedly even closer. And the projected "Columba agreement" ... sorry; I do feel I have to break off here while you indulge your natural outrage that such a very Catholic Saint should have his name hijacked for yet another of these mushy verbal fudges that will further humiliate the poor pathetic little remnants of "Catholic" sentiment still surviving ("enjoying space to flourish" is the official terminological inexactitude) within the Church of England.

OK? Ready? I'll continue. We all know how "Columba" will end: another of these concordats the essential meaning of which will be that Anglican priests are identical to Protestant ministers; that an ecclesial body without an episcopal polity is no less "Church" than a body that thinks it has one. The Church of England has been saying this, more often, with greater force, and with regard to geographically closer or more significant bodies, ever since the poor little Jerusalem Bishopric so upset Newman ... through South India in the 1950s ... and Scandinavia in the 1990s. How many times does the C of E have to say the same thing before those of its members who call themselves "Catholics" realise that it really does mean what it keeps on and on saying?

Porvoo, not the ordination of women, was the point at which I realised that the Church of England was not a body in which I could have a permanent home; after that, the practical question was simply how to get out, acting corporately rather than as an individual; a question so graciously answered by Benedict XVI. The Church of England officially and enthusiastically agrees with the judgment that Leo XIII made. Those who retain a Catholic doctrine of Holy Order, and still remain in the Church of England, can only do so by saying that the Church of England, and Leo XIII, were both wrong; and that "I understand Catholic teaching about Sacramental validity better than did Leo XIII; and, although the C of E says that its ministry is equivalent to Protestant ministries, it has in fact misunderstood its own truest nature ... which I understand better."

Logically tenable ... but what a very uncomfortable position to hold! I know, because I've been there!I have not quite said everything which I think has to be said on this matter ... No comments will be enabled.

29 July 2016

I don't want to bore faithful long-time readers of my effusions ... but (happily) new readers do keep turning up. To these I desire to make clear that it is my policy to decline to enable posts which assert or imply Sedevacantism.

I have often written on this distasteful subject, and my pieces can, I presume, be accessed by means of the Search Engine.

Two very brief pointers.

(1) Sedevacantism is the other side of the coin of Ultrapapalism (Hyperbergoglioism?) expressed by a number of the undesirables who surround the Holy Father. In each case, there is the same erroneous major premise.

The Pope is a demigod;Bergoglio is clearly not a demigod;Therefore Bergoglio is not pope.

The Pope is a demigod;Bergoglio is pope; Therefore Bergoglio is a demigod.

BOTH ARE HERESIES contrary to the teaching of Vatican I about the papal office.

(2) Whichever of the many forms of sedevacantism you are tempted by, subject it to the Pope Honorius Test. He was condemned by an Ecumenical Council and anathematised by a successor. But can anyone produce any evidence that the Council, or any subsequent popes who condemned him, or any reputable ecclesistical writer, has ever argued that Honorius had ceased to be Pope at the moment when he acted heretically?

Whether or not you like Bergoglio, he is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the Pope.

28 July 2016

The only occasion when I have been to a SSPX Mass, when I was still an Anglican priest, was when the family sent Pam and me to Avignon for a week to celebrate our 40th Wedding Anniversary (our 50th comes next year si fata mihi parcent superstiti). I went to Sunday Mass in the exquisite rococo chapel of the Black Penitents.

The Black Penitents, don't you feel, sound rather like something sinister in a Gothick novel by Mrs Radcliff. They were in fact a pious confraternity whose charity embraced those imprisoned nearby, and those sentenced to death. They had the privilege of being able to reprieve each year one of those sentenced for a capital offence.

A couple of weeks ago, exploring Lake Garda by the ferries from my comfortable and hospitable base in the Locanda agli Angeli at Gardone Riviera, I found myself in Desenzano, once the capital of the canton embracing the Southern part of the Lake. Having 'done' the very rewarding duomo (which, in this part of Italy, means a large church, not necesarily with a cathedra ... another old Italian term going back to the first millennium is pieve, meaning a church with a Baptistry), I climbed the hill to have a closer look at the Castle occupying the high ground. A few feet away from it, was a church built as a Chapel of S John Baptist decollati for the the Confraternity of that name. Their charism appears to have been much the same as that of the Black Penitents of Avignon.

(Incidentally, down in the piazza of Desenzano is a Memorial to those who died in the First World War. What struck me was its fierce reference to the salveggia rabbia of the Germans and Austrians. I could detect no evidence that this might have been covered up or tampered with during the years of Italy's Second World War alliance with Hitler. Thought-provoking, yes?)

27 July 2016

"There are two sets of seats, the higher set of 19 stalls with backing, and the lower set in the form of a bench. They are local workmanship of 1750. They served for the recitation of the canonical hours; in fact, until 1797 there were at Gardone ten chaplains who, together with the Archpriest, recited daily the canonical hours, receiving a share of the funds which were confiscated by the Provisional Government of Brescia in 1797. All these chaplains were at the service of the various schools and confraternities: of the Blessed Sacrament, of the Holy Rosary ... and were dedicated to the instruction of the children in reading and writing".

So says the guide book of the Church of S Nicolas in the exquisite village of Gardone Riviera, where some lucky souls, including this one, go (Deo volente) each summer for the Roman Forum. The choir stalls thus described are to the East of the High Altar. From Gardone, you can get ferries round Lake Garda, visiting the the other townships and villages; these include Salo, centre of ("Little Gerrrls, this is Signor Mussolini. He is called Il Duuuce") the 'Italian Social Republic' where Mussolini spent the last months of the War (and of his life). And the Sirmio of Catullus, from which he sailed his yacht ... and Venetian strongholds in this part of the dominions of the Most Serene Republic, stretching as far North as Malcesine where the Lake ends in the Alps. There can surely be no better centre, no lovelier, no more hospitable, for exploring this fascinating area than the Locanda agli Angeli in Gardone Riviera.

Quite a number of the churches around Lake Garda have the same arrangement as Gardone Church; indeed, quite a lot of them were built or rebuilt around the same time (1740 is the date on Gardone Church). Why? Is this gathering of such 'chaplains' into collegiate life usual throughout Italy? Is the provision of choir stalls for them behind High Altars common?

Sed et in Arcadia Buonaparte. In March 1797, the West Bank of Garda was lost to La Serenissima and came under the rule of the 'Provisional Government of Brescia', until in November that entity was itself subsumed into the Napoleonic state of the 'Cisalpine Republic'. The Garda Riviera was among the areas which resisted the Provisional Government. It was during this period of ecclesiastical despoliation that the Dominican House in Brescia was closed: its fantastic pietra dura Rosary Altar is now the Lady Altar, the crowning glory, in London's Brompton Oratory.

Next summer, why not go to the Roman Forum? Moreover, if, meanwhile, you still need a holiday this summer combining stunning scenery, Art History (every church in the area is crammed with masterpieces), a lake fit for swimming, fine food, marvellous local wines, why not see if you can still get a booking at the Locanda agli Angeli and, from there, 'do' Garda?

26 July 2016

After much thought and prayer, I have appointed Mr Ben Whitworth Huius Bloggi Laureatum bene merentem for his Limerick on the thread of July 21.

It is my view that the world, and the Church, need more limericks. I do not think that we can put our woes behind us unless the production of limericks, especially among Traditionalists, is dramatically stepped up. Magisterial documents should never, if they are to merit a proper obsequium, lack a limerick.

Readers will be aware that the earliest known limerick is that composed by S Thomas Aquinas in his Prayer After Communion:

Perhaps there is something I'm missing, but I can't understand this unless gloriam is a misprint for gloria.

If this is so ... (1) does this mistake appear in other recent reprints of the 1962 Missal? (2) Is it in the Missals of the later 1950s? (3) Have readers found other howlers in the 1962 Missal ... any publication of it ... (4) How about the 1961 Breviary?

24 July 2016

I am more than fully occupied for the whole of the coming week with the LMS Latin Summer School. Never, when I 'worked' full-time, did I work so hard! During this week, this Blog will be a NO-COMMENT Blog. In other words, comments arriving will be deleted unread. Comments sent after July 31 will be reviewed and moderated in the usual way.

Since Papa Bergoglio does not believe in making a fetich of Law, I suppose I am Out of Fashion in referring to the questionable training of our Catholic clergy. I refer to the scandal that for more than a generation those being formed for the priesthood were - in flagrant disregard of CIC 249 - not made fluent in Latin (are things any better now?).

As long ago as 1933, C S ('Patrimony') Lewis advanced the suggestion that the attacks - even then - upon the position of Latin and Greek as the basis of education, might be part of a plot devised in Hell to subvert the Faith. In The Pilgrim's Regress he reminds the reader that "till recently" members of our society "had been made to learn" these languages "and that meant that at least they started no further from the light than the old Pagans themselves and had therefore the chance to come at last" to saving Faith. "But now they are cutting themselves off even from that roundabout route ... and suppressing every kind of knowledge except mechanical knowledge". He believed that this shift had much to do with the need of the educated classes to cope with the increasing disinclination of the lower orders to work in domestic service, and added "No doubt the great landowners in the background [scilicet devils] have their own reasons for encouraging this movement".

You will not be surprised to be reminded that one such 'landowner', His Abysmal Sublimity Under Secretary Screwtape, strongly advocated the policy of preventing each generation from learning from its predecessors: "Since we [devils] cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another." That is why the demise of sacred languages among the clergy and the clerisy is such a triumph for our Enemy. As we have seen recently, the problem becomes worse when Cardinals, Bishops, and/or their liturgical advisers, cannot parse accurately a simple piece of Latin.

Incidentally, we have here a fine argument for constantly rereading the older documents of the Magisterium ... not because they said every useful thing which would ever need to be said, or said everything in the best possible way, but so that "the characteristic errors of one generation may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another".

Older readers may remember the teaching given to the Universal Church by S John XXIII in Veterum sapientia. This was an Apostolic Constitution about the necessity of Latin, which the good old man went to all the trouble of signing upon the High Altar of S Peter's itself. Frankly, I think his wisdom is all the more essential during this pontificate in which it appears to be held by people close to the Pontiff that there has been a sea-change which moves the Catholic Church on from the old paradigms.

Here I have a problem. I would love to share all the important bits of this Apostolic Constitution with you, but, after doing the two clicks necessary to bring it up on my screen, I realised that pretty well every word of this document is the purest gold. So ... here are just a very few words in order to stimulate your resolution to do those two clicks yourselves. "No-one is to be admitted to the study of Philosophy or Theology except he be thoroughly grounded in [Latin] and capable of using it ... wherever the study of Latin has suffered partial eclipse ... the traditional method of teaching the language is to be completely restored. Such is Our will ... the major sacred sciences shall be taught in Latin ... if ignorance of Latin makes it difficult for some [seminary professors] to obey these instructions, they shall gradually be replaced by professors who are suited to this task ..." NOTE that he could have left his encouragement of Latin in terms of vague and unthreatening general exhortations. There is, surely, something engagingly raw about his order for the wholesale sacking of seminary professors! Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? When I'm Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, there may have to be some changes at Allen Hall ... (but not including the removal of the admirable Fr John Hemer).'Liberals', of course, might point out that this document is not ex cathedra (although the Altar of S Peter is not a million miles from the papal cathedra). I agree, because I think the adverb graduallyis unnecessary.

As for sedevacantists who deny that the author of these wise words, S John XXIII, was truly pope, well, what I say is Burn the lot of them. It's the only sort of language these people understand!

23 July 2016

Fr Zed reveals that another North American Bishop ... another bloke who needs to be sent an elementary booklet on Latin Grammar ... has decided to jump on the Down With The East bandwagon. But this chappy has upped the ante by actually adding the word obedienceto the menaces he has employed against his clergy.

When, in 1968, I was ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England, the oath of canonical obedience included the phrase "all things lawful and honest". In other words, the undertaking was circumscribed by the limitation that a bishop must be acting within the law.

This limitation is not explicit in the Ordination rites of the Latin Church. But it is implicit in the canonical understanding of obedience; compare, for example, cum secundum proprias constitutiones praecipiunt (601); and legitime praecipienti vel prohibenti (1371#2). It is also implicit in the favour shown by the recent Magisterium towards the concept of subsidiarity. If a bishop praecepit vel prohibuit contrary to an explicit Responsum ad dubium of a Roman dicastery, this must raise a grave question about whether his actions are binding.

If a bishop's orders are not within his legal competence, and a scrupulous presbyter is in doubt what to do, he will find help in the repetition by Canon 14 of the ancient adage Leges ... in dubio iuris non urgent. Doubtful laws, including doubtful episcopal precepts, do not bind. And, while Cardinal Sarah's words were not legislative, a mere presbyter may surely feel that the publicly expressed opinions of a dicasterial Prefect about what is lawful within his own area of dicasterial competence are prima facie reliable guides.

Let's be human about this. I could understand a bishop pointing out in a kindly way that Facing The Other Way might cause hassle and dissension in a parish; and asking whether it was really worth the trouble. His judgement might very well be correct. He does have a responsibility in his diocese for Liturgy and for peace and harmony. I could understand it if he said "I would very much prefer that you didn't do it without having a chat with me". Or even "I'm the one who will have to pick up the pieces, and I've only got one secretary".

What grates is the lofty, totally unpastoral, lordly issuing of what are made to look like regulations or laws or prohibitions, especially when they grotesquely and misrepresent what the real Law really says. Surely, in this third Christian millennium, we have moved beyond such prelatical and tyrannous understandings of what it means to be a bishop.

I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of Catholic Bishops is pastorally minded and that a couple of tin-pot Hitlers with chips on their shoulders are unrepresentative. And that is not irony.

22 July 2016

Further UPDATE: The admirable, erudite and hospitable Mgr Wadsworth has kindly copied to me the official text of the new OF Preface for S Mary Madalene ~~~ and the hortu has been corrected to horto. So no longer need we speculate about whether an amazingly sophisticated pun was intended between horto/(h)ortu (garden/dawn). But the Congregation's Typing Pool has not left us bereft of philological excitements: the heading now reads Variationes et addictiones (sic)

UPDATE: A most gratifying thread, establishing, I think, a strong probability that the Appendix attached to the Compendium of the Catechism is the source of the mistake hortu. Before writing my original text (following) I did check of course in OLD and L&S and found no evidence either early (Varro) or late for hortus in the Fourth Declension. The Compendium was published in 2005. Can anybody push hortu any further back?

So Rome has decreed that the noun hortus (a garden) shall henceforth be deemed to be of the fourth declension rather than of the second.

I wonder what the dogmatic consequences of this are. Does it offer revolutionary eisegetical possibilities for expounding Genesis 3? Lexicographically, of course, it means that faithful obedient Novus Ordo Catholics will be obliged, in the future, to refer not to horticulture but tohortuculture.

Traddies, needless to say, in their petty-minded, contrary, manner, will probably seize every opportunity to work horticulture into their conversations as a childish way of "getting at" Papa Bergoglio. Or should I write "Papa Bergugliu"? How should one decline Bergoglio? Will there be a Vatican ruling on this?

How terribly difficult it is to be a Catholic and/or a hortuculturalist in the Third Millennium.

Some readers may not be aware that our more-than superb Ordinariate Missal, while tolerating a variety of ritual uses, demonstrates a distinct and habitual preference for ad Orientem. I give just two rubrical examples: "The priest kisses the altar and, turning towards the People, extending and then joining his hands, says aloud: Pray brethren ..."; and "He kisses the altar and, turning to the People, making the Sign of the Cross over them, he says: And the blessing of God Almighty ...".

Cardinal Nichols reportedly wrote recently to his clergy that the Mass was not an occasion for a celebrant to "exercise personal preference or taste". This phraseology rang an instant bell in my mind. Haven't I heard him say that before? Readers may like to have a bit of context here.

In September 2014, addressing by invitation laity and clergy of the British Ordinariate, Nichols spoke in terms very closely similar to this. I will share with you a few of his 2014 phrases; the rather obvious feature which you will notice is the insistent repetition of the same theme in very much the same words.

"What you do, if it is done in the spirit of your Patron, will not be done as matter of personal taste, of subjective likes and dislikes. Whether in matters of liturgy ... what matters is ... striving not to satisfy your own taste, your own personal preferences ..."the fashioning of this Ordinariate contribution is not a matter of personal taste ... I also suggest a criterion by which that discernment between subjective taste and service of the truth may be made ... Does what you do, in pursuit of a proper distinctiveness, clearly lead to holiness?" ... fashioning the patterns of the Ordinariate, be they liturgical ..."We live in an age of deep individualism. The priority of personal satisfaction ..."So I hope that as the Ordinariate develops, its parishes and groups will not be shaped by the individual personal preferences of its members, by personal likes and dislikes which are often so contentious. " ... whatever we may be doing, whether in liturgy ..." ... no other preoccupation, whether aesthetical ..."
I just love that the word contentious. Clearly, ex contextu, it means "what I personally dislike". So much, surely, is obvious. But I would like to be permitted a few contingent observations.

Firstly, both of the Forms of the Roman Rite allow for either orientation. This is clear in each case from their Rubrics. I am on record as suggesting that those who celebrate the Extraordinary Form should not be closed to the possibility of celebrating it facing the people, in a church building which is orientated so thatfacing the people is the same as facing East. I have myself happily celebrated the EF versus populum.

Secondly; this whole sad episode vividly warns us of the broader potential dangers of transfering competences from Roman Dicasteries to Bishops' Conferences. Nichols' recent email to his clergy was, of course, addressed only to the clergy of his own diocese. It is of highly doubtful authority even within his own jurisdiction (readers may remember how the local ordinary of EWTN once tried to compel Mother Angelica's people to conform to his personal preference for versus populum but was compelled by Rome to withdraw his ultra vires 'regulation'). But Episcopal Conferences, if Papa Bergoglio gave them the sort of powers disallowed in the Apostolos suos of S John Paul II, could make things very bad for priests and parishes. I can imagine 'local regulations'. There are persistent hints that some pushy Conferences want more powers "in the interests of subsidiarity" ... and one suspects what that could mean in terms of wholesale local bullying and the attempted elimination of lawful liberties currently enjoyed.

We need to remind ourselves of that superb example of real subsidiarity, given when Summorum pontificum established the competence of celebrating the EF in the hands of the celebrating presbyter. Ecce Subsidiaritas vera et authentica! Here is another piece of subsidiarity: "Any priest of the Ordinariate may ... celebrate the Mass according to Divine Worship outside the parishes of the Ordinariate when celebrating Mass ... publicly with the permission of the rector/pastor of the corresponding church or parish." No need for episcopal approval! Vivat Benedictus papa!

Thirdly: we in the Ordinariates should admit that we do ourselves have duties and important obligations towards the broader church. Perhaps we have been negligent. We owe it to the 'diocesan' Church to be much more proactive in explaining what it is about our own liturgical patrimony which makes it (in Pope Benedict's view) such an important gift to the entire Church. The importance of things like versus Orientem and Communion received kneeling are not understood by many in the Novus Ordo ethos; and how can the poor chaps and chappesses understand if nobody ever explains these matters to them? The Ordinariates are in the splendid position of being able to say "Here am I: send me"!

And perhaps we should be less reticent about explaining what is so contentious about the musical texts, the soggy and dodgy drivel, often sung among 'diocesan' congregations; and why (coming as we do, like Blessed John Henry, from an 'Anglican literary and patristic' background) we prefer scriptural, patristic, and doctrinally orthodox chants and hymnody. Another contentious matter is the unnecessary use of "Extraordinary (sic) Eucharistic Ministers" in the diocesan Churches. I once said a weekday Novus Ordo Mass in a diocesan church; the congregation consisted of two ladies ... one of whom duly came up to administer the chalice to the other! Not that I minded in the least ... a lifetime of ministry in the Church of England has left me with an almost endless capacity for amused tolerance of liturgical silliness ... but this sort of thing is, if we are to be pedantic, an abuse. Yet another contentious disregard of the mens of the Novus Ordo is the almost universal disuse of the First Eucharistic Prayer, and its replacement even on Sundays (against the advice of the GIRM) by the 'Trastevere Trattoria' Eucharistic Prayer. A final example of something contentious: in the early months of the British Ordinariate, there were accounts at our 'formation' sessions of Ordinariate clergy being angrily criticised by some of the older diocesan clergy for their unwillingness to disregard the canonical restrictions imposed by the Church on the giving of General Absolution.

Lastly: the See of Westminster is not Primatial. Nichols' own views and opinions on versus Orientem and his personal tastes and preferences with regard to Liturgy generally are of interest, if at all, only to his own diocesan subjects in his own half of Greater London. When he spoke to the Ordinariate, he was addressing the subjects of another Ordinary (of whom he is not even the Metropolitan). In fact, Mgr Newton has as much and as little power over Cardinal Nichols' subjects as Nichols has over Newton's. Our Ordinary is not some sort of Vicar General ad Anglicanos.

We should do more; we should be more frank. We in the Ordinariates have been too downbeat; too reticent; too shy; too inclined to keep our heads below some imaginary parapet. The Diocesan Church needs our input! Let us raise again the marvellous phrase of Benedict XVI: "Mutual Enrichment"!

21 July 2016

So those bishops around the world who resent liturgical renewal are getting ever nastier, and turning the screws on their unfortunate clergy ... especially the younger ones (you'd think they might be glad to have one or two younger clergy as they shut down their priestless churches by the dozen).

Why? I think they had their minds formed in an age when liturgical texts and habits preceding the 1970s were viewed by some with a deeply and viscerally personal detestation. There are some around who are still motivated by the same obsessive aversions.

Hence, the fuss caused by Sarahgate (am I first with this neologism?). It has close similarities with the fuss after Summorum Pontificum. Remember? The poor chaps in their terror complained that their declining dioceses would explode into liturgical chaos (did that ever happen?). When some curial officials came over to explain Anglicanorum coetibus to the English bishops, it transpired that some of them were still more angry about Summorum Pontificum (which had emerged two years earlier).

Sad, really, that some bishops had (have?) so little confidence in the good sense of their clergy.

Cardinal Sarah's admirable and timely advice has stirred up exactly the same widespread and uncontrolled panic; the same draconian attempts to devise intricate dodges to 'prohibit' clergy from doing things which the relevant dicasterial authorities have declared to be perfectly lawful. Apparently, ad Orientem is 100% legal and woe betide any priest in my diocese who employs it!

Why such silly tantrums? A wise priest trained in psychiatry has diagnosed the problem thus: They associate the Extraordinary Form with what they think of as a repressive and sin-obsessed form of Catholicism from which they were glad to be set free.

In other words, their liturgical passions are still tangled up in their adolescent struggles with their now aged hormones.

20 July 2016

I began a six-part series on the Epiclesis and its admirable absence from the Roman Canon on 9 March 2015. I invite those interested to read that series. I don't feel vastly inclined to write replies to enquirers which would merely replicate hastily what I wrote with quite a lot of deliberation then.

19 July 2016

No; I don't read the Tablet, considering it dubiously moral to push one penny in that direction, but I noticed that its front cover is currently advertising an attack (inevitably) on Cardinal Sarah, by some "liturgist" called Mark Francis. This set bells ringing in my mind. I think he may be the same person as the writer who welcomed Summorum Pontificum with the condescending comment that Papa Ratzinger, poor chap, meant well but was "not a Trained Liturgist". On that occasion, so I recall, he described the Tridentine Rite as "Medieval", and complained at the same time that the Roman Canon was "pneumatologically anaemic" ... which (for those of you who prefer to speak English) means that, except at the end, it doesn't mention the Holy Ghost.

That, of course, is because the Roman Canon is still marked by its origins before the fourth century explosion of interest in the Holy Spirit which led, in the East, to the idea that the Transformation of the Eucharistic Elements is caused by the celebrant calling down upon them ("Epiclesis") the Holy Spirit. The Roman Canon, being of earlier origins, operates on the assumption that the Elements are transformed simply through their gracious acceptance by the Father. MF breezily informed us that everybody agrees on the importance of the Epiclesis, so that the classical Roman Rite is gravely defective because it lacks one.

MF, astute bloke, thus contrived to criticise the classical Roman Rite both for being too late ("medieval") and for being too early ("pneumatologically anaemic"), and to do so pretty well in the same breath. (Given this instinct for enthusiastic self-contradiction, it would not be surprising if he feels rather more happily at home in this pontificate than he did in the last.)

What a terrific shame it is that Time Travel is only a literary fiction. Otherwise, we could have shipped MF back to that hillside on which the Man from Nazareth was advising His disciples on how to pray. After hearing the text of the Our Father, MF could have put Him straight on a whole raft of highly important things. "Of course, my dear Fellow, you chaps from Nazareth don't have the advantage of being trained liturgists. If you did, you would have realised that the prayer you have just suggested (of course, it does have one or two good bits in it; not bad; not at all bad for a first attempt) is gravely flawed by its pneumatological anaemia. My fellow Experts and I will draft for you three Alternative Lord's Prayers which will include an essential clause about the Holy Spirit. We will make one of them very brief indeed, so that your followers over the millennia will be saved an awful lot of time ... ".

And the Lord's Prayer to His Father at the Last Supper (John 17) stands very badly in need of the revising pen of Trained Liturgists. How we all wince every time we hear that disgracefully Binitarian formula ("Thou, Father, art [one] in me and I in thee ...")! How much less defective it would have been if it had been revised or, indeed ... far, far better still ... created from scratch by the sanctis et venerabilibus manibus of Archbishop Bugnini himself.

(My Byzantine friends will understand that I am nothing if not deeply respectful of their own beautiful and venerable rite in its own full integrity. I deplore the Byzantinisation of the Roman Rite not one ounce more than I would condemn the Latinisation of the Byzantine Rite.)

18 July 2016

The High Altar should be constructed separated from the wall so that there is the possibility for it to be easily walked round and celebration towards the people to be done at it, a thing which is convenient wherever it is possible.

A thing whichin the neuter cannot refer in Latin grammar just to celebration towards the people, because celebration is feminine. So it has to refer to whole clauses.

It must refer either to the whole previous bit of the sentence The High Altar ...... at it, or to the ut-clause so that there is the possibility ...... at it.

possibility, not rigid uniformity, is in the mind of the legislator. Otherwise, he is commanding that the the Altar be walked around ... presumably, so as to be censed ... at every Mass; i.e. he is prohibiting the celebration of Mass without incense. He's not. He's just asking that, where possible, walking round the Altar to cense it should not be excluded. (I believe the 1962 Missal, of which I do not possess a copy, explicitly envisages that a priest celebrating versus apsidem should, where this is possible, walk around the Atar to cense it on all four sides.)

The intention clearly is to ensure that in the construction of new churches, liturgical flexibilty is not impeded by the plan of the sanctuary. This passage is misused if it is treated as legislation with regard to the orientation of the celebrant. Or to a prescriptive and invariable use of incense.
I shall not enable any more comments on this detail to my Auctoritas post.

Because, frankly, I regard all this as totally boring and unfruitful. The whole point of my Auctoritas post was to point out that there are vastly broader and more important questions in play here, and that how we worship is not dependant upon how we might be able to extract obiter implications from a legislative text intended for a quite different purpose. For Vincent Nichols or his advisers to drag this into the discussion demonstrates a very silly petty legalism ... and, incidentally, shows the flimsiness of the basis for the onslaught upon Robert Sarah. If Nichols has any concern for his own reputation, he should withdraw his email and apologise to Sarah and sack his advisers.

17 July 2016

I commend a splendid article by a splendid young Byzantine Rite scholar, Professor Adam deVille, whom I have had the privilege and pleasure of talking with. It is in the NCR with the above title. (h/t to Professor Tighe.)

Tasters: " ... papal centralisation and personality cult" with regard to which D looks forward to "a necessary welcomed healthful decline back to earth"; "An undisciplined papacy that has done much damage with off-the-cuff comments and other utterances of dubious authority and tortuous prolixity"; "people huddling in the papal petticoats"; "shady operatives ..."

Professor deVille points out the enormously bad impression given to Orthodox and to Eastern Christians generally when badly advised Western prelates do disastrous and silly things like attacking the Ecumenical versus Orientem consensus.

I particularly like the phrase "people huddling in the papal petticoats". I only wish I had thought of it myself. Superb alliteration and assonance, worthy of Virgil and Ovid! Vividly striking imagery! Somebody commented to me only the other day how much broader the Holy Father's skirts had become since my birthday in 2013. The effect of the Santa Marta kitchens? Too much sitting in airliners? Too many cosy and sedentary chats with dodgy sycophants?

16 July 2016

A liturgical form can have full canonical status; and when it does, it is clear that a cleric is (for example) fulfilling his obligation to the Office by using it. But the Latin term auctoritas has a more subtle sense than mere canonical liceity. It might suggest the personal influence which a player in Roman politics had, quite distinct from any imperium which he might enjoy as a result of a magistracy which he held. Or a sense of authoritativeness or impressiveness, of personal prestige or repute; we all know the sort of person who, perhaps in a committee or gathering, is listened to the moment he opens his mouth and whose interventions invite a respect out of all proportion to his merely legal status. It is a characteristic of the Good Woman in Proverbs that her husband is great among the elders at the gate; when such people are moved to utterance, other people put their hands to their mouths. In our secular politics, the policies which were embodied in the manifesto of a government which has won power by a sweeping majority have auctoritas greater than the ideas dreamed up last night by a premier who is holding onto power by his fingertips ... although the constitutional power may be formally the same in each case.

O'CONNELLAuctoritas as opposed to mere canonical liceity has always had a place in Liturgy. When manualists such as the admirable O'Connell talked about a custom which is even contra legem enjoying by virtue of its longevity not merely liceity but even prescription above the letter of the rubric, it is in a way auctoritas that they are talking about. But I contend that the radical changes that followed Vatican II raise the question of auctoritas in new, difficult, and acute forms. The basic reason for this is the most striking novelty involved in post-Conciliar liturgical texts: multiple choices facing a celebrant or a worshipping community as they prepare to celebrate a rite. What every celebrant said daily at every altar of the Roman Rite throughout the world for centuries obviously had enormous auctoritas. A novel formula which has just been put on some menu from which choices are to be made, manifestly has very much less. Whereas, before the Council, something that auctoritas urged one to do was broadly in line with what was canonically licit, after the Conciliar 'reforms' auctoritas and liceity might find themselves standing further and further apart from each other.

RATZINGER

I strongly agree with Joseph Ratzinger's view that there is something highly questionable about the idea that a Roman Pontiff can do anything especially if backed by a mandate of an ecumenical council. Still less would I agree that legislative bodies inferior to the Pontiff himself have such power. I would contend that what is wrong with that idea is, among other things, its forgetfulness of liturgical auctoritas. And my inclination is to believe that, in many and important respects, the 'reforms' went beyond the conciliar mandate of Sacrosanctum Concilium (praeter concilium) and, even more problematically, in some cases directly contradicted it (contra concilium). In my view, changes praeter Concilium have less auctoritas than those which do rest on a conciliar mandate; and changes contra Concilium raise, as Benedict XVI implied, extremely acute difficulties with regard to their auctoritas.

I expect some Catholic readers may feel uneasy about the path I am treading. This is because the Catholic Church, more than most ecclesial bodies, has a deeply ingrained sense of Law. This makes it easy for Roman Catholics to underestimate the force of auctoritas. But Benedict XVI was appealing directly to this when he wrote "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful". In so teaching, in so using the word "cannot", he was not speaking in terms of canonical or legislative details; he was arguing theologically.

Cardinal Nichols, or his advisers, were quite mistaken in their arguments, drawn from misunderstood details in the Latin of legislative texts, in claiming the illegality of celebrating the Novus Ordo versus apsidem (incidentally, if this were so, why have successive Archbishops of Westminster since Vatican II never brought the Brompton Oratory to heel?).

But, even had they been right, this would not have dimished the overwhelming force, based on well-nigh universal custom and Patristic testimony, of the auctoritas of versus Orientem and versus apsidem.

15 July 2016

Versus Orientem or Versus Populum? An important point which I don't think anyone has emphasised, in all the wordage concerning the attack of Vincent Cardinal Nichols upon the Address of Cardinal Sarah, is this:

Both of these Eminent gentlemen are totally agreed that this is a subject that really matters.

Cardinal Sarah makes this abundantly clear in his text. And he must have thought carefully before speaking in a way which he must have known would create a violent reaction. His act was not legislative. But it was a considered action on the part of the official appointed by the Roman Pontiff himself to have charge of the Roman Rite. It was an act of some considerable personal bravery. (For that reason, it seems to me that clergy should themselves have the courage not to let Robert Sarah down.) And the fact that he mentioned the First Sunday in Advent means that this is not some flaccid and timorous vague aspiration to which we might one day get round in the decade after next. He has called on us to do something concrete on a specific day quite soon.

And Cardinal Nichols is equally convinced that this really matters. He instantly emailed all his clergy. Cardinals do not go on to the public record as rubbishing what a brother cardinal has just said, unless they are feeling quite ... er ... excited. And the facts in the public domain strongly suggest that someone instantly got in touch with Papa Bergoglio, who in turn summoned Cardinal Sarah. And the usual machinery started to work in the Vatican Press Office in order ... as we say in Anglo-English ... to hang Sarah out to dry.Fr Lombardi and ... more especially ... the sinister Fr Rosica manifestly warmed to their unwholesome task. Nichols would not have set all that in motion over some little detail which no sensible person could possibly consider to matter.

Sarah and Nichols are both 100% right: this does matter. It goes to the heart of the question of what the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass really is. It touches upon that whole raft of practical changes ("Reordering") which were not in any way whatsoever mandated by the Council but which were put into effect by those who subsequently got their hands on to the levers of power. It bears powerfully upon the crucial question of whether the mighty task of the redintegratio of Catholic worship, set in motion by Papa Ratzinger, will continue under Papa Bergoglio's successor.

Even further than that, it encapsulates the fundamental question raised by Benedict XVI, of whether we should see Vatican II in terms of reform within a hermeneutic of continuity, or whether the structural ruptures inflicted on the Church in the 1970s, with such catastrophic effects within the Church over the following four decades, are now to be set in dry, cold, inflexible stone.

We have reached a turning point at which every priest knows that if he heeds Cardinal Sarah's exhortation, he makes it easier for his brother priests also to do the same; and that that if he opts for a quiet life, it will be that bit easier for the Tablet and ACTA to pick off his bolder brother clergy by clamouring for their episcopal persecution. There is no reason why a start cannot be made, after catechesis, by introducing versus Orientem 'provisionally'on alternate Sundays, or even just on the first Sunday of each month. Advent, when priest and people go forward together to meet the Lord who Comes to us, is indeed a highly suitable occasion.

In the Veni Sancte Spiritus we ask God the Holy Spirit to water what is parched, to heal what is wounded, to bend what is rigid, to warm what is cold, to govern that which strays from the way.

But to do these things, the Holy Spirit needs willing human cooperators. The Body of Christ operates on Grace, not on Magic.

14 July 2016

For a bit of summer fun, I reproduce this ancient (2009) piece with its original thread. I apologise to friends who dislike it; but my sympathies have been Jacobite for about sixty years now and I feel just that little bit too old to change. I beg them to tolerate it as a Period Piece and me as a poor old has-been.

Well, Oxford has just about reached the end of her academic year. The confident accents of the New England upper classes, so delightfully dominant in the streets of Oxford during Full Term, have given place to the no less inscrutable whimperings of Japanese tourists. In the Old Days, last Saturday was the end of the last of the four terms into which the academic year was divided: commonly called Act Term. The University "Act" was a scurrilous occasion upon which a speaker called Terrae Filius made a satirical attack on pretty well everything. Unfortunately, so edifying a custom could not survive the eighteenth century. It is not simply that such things fell foul of whiggish, Chesterfieldian, standards of propriety; in the aftermath of the Hannoverian Usurpation they were positively dangerous. Oxford had retained her loyalty to her King, and the young men liked nothing better than to drink toasts to the King over the water, duck Hannover Rats in the river, and give noisy manifestations of their political preferences. So, after the failed attempt by James III in 1715 to restore lawful authority, prudence ordained that the University Act had to be neutered. Not that anybody imagined that Oxford had changed her views; the Elector sent a detachment of troops to make their own point, while demonstrating his favour for the junior university, where Whiggery prevailed, by giving it a generous benefaction of books. Oxford wits observed that he had certainly noticed Oxford's lack of 'loyalty' and had equally accurately discerned Cambridge's lack of learning.

I don't suppose there are many around this July to drink loyal toasts or drown Whigs. Certainly not the New Englanders and probably not the Japanese. But today is the Birthday of the Prince who, by the laws of primogeniture would inherit the crowns of Henry IX, and last week was the Anniversary of his Accession de jure to the Thrones of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland; to the Dukedoms of Bavaria, Franconia, and Swabia; and to the County Palatine of the Rhine.

13 July 2016

(2) Father Zed has a very good piece saying most of what needs to be pointed out with regard to Cardinal Nichols' attack on versus Orientem.

(3) Rorate reveals the urgent appeal being made to the College of Cardinals and the Patriarchs of the sui iuris Churches, asking them to beg the Sovereign Pontiff to clarify passages in Amoris laetitia which appear to give countenance to heterodoxies. I cannot suggest that you read it, because, as a necessarily proper courtesy, its text is not being made public before it has been sent to the Cardinals. But it bears the signatures of some very distinguished theologians, and I ask readers to pray, with great earnestness, that this initiative may bring forth rich fruit. I assure you that it is extremely precise and logical, in the best tradition of accurate theological discourse within the Catholic Church, and eschews woffle and rhetoric. (Is that how one spells waffle?)

12 July 2016

Tomorrow is the Year's Mind, as we say in the Patrimony, of our late Sovereign Liege Lord, Henry IX, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Cardinal Bishop of Frascati and later Dean of the College of Cardinals. He took part in several conclaves, most notably the conclave in Venice which followed the death in prison of Pius VI during the darkest period of the Enlightenment.

I wonder if readers can suggest ways of celebrating the reign of one of our most endearing sovereigns. I suppose the obvious thing would be to consume a bottle of Frascati.

I believe my late friend, Fr Michael Melrose, pp of S Giles' Reading, once told me that His Majestic Eminence died of an excess of Melons. It is an enormous shame that Father didn't live long enough to join the Ordinariate; the items in his capacious and idiosyncratic memory were just the sort of riches that make our Patrimonial community so exuberant and vibrant.

So ... a Canteloupe with crudo, and a toast to His Eminent Majesty, drunk in Frascati?

10 July 2016

In today's EF Collect, Largire, the term propitius is very oddly placed. It can be forcibly translated as being in its usual function of an adjective in grammatical concord with the Deus or Dominus who is being addressed, and which thus invites an English adverbial rendering; "Mercifully" is the Cranmerian rendering in, ex. gr., the collects for Epiphany and Epiphany III in the Ordinariate Missal. (Interestingly, Cranmer omitted propitius in his rendering of today's collect, which in our rite is attached to the Ninth Sunday after Trinity for reasons which I explained on July 4). But its placing is just plain weird.

Sr Dr Haessly (sub Dominica) remarks that propitius is in an "unusual position", and wonders whether it should be taken with largire spiritum cogitandi or with largire spiritum agendi or as "a common element" with both. Sr Dr Ellebracht, whose promotor ad doctoratum was the well-nigh divine Christine Mohrmann (why do we hear so little from modern liturgists about these great women students of the Classical Roman Rite?) lists (sub voce) the word patterns within which propitius commonly occurs. "This adjective reveals an exceptionally strong tendency to be used in fixed expressions ... Thus we see how rigidly stylised the use of this adjective is. There is remarkably little variety in its employment." Today's Collect does not exhibit any of the four patterns she documents.

When one turns to the Verona Sacramentary (quondam "Leonine"), one finds that the text gives, not propitius, but promptius.

We instantly perceive the ease with which the m could be replaced with a tilde and thus become lost, leaving an incomprehensible proptius which would invite easy 'correction' to propitius.

The post-Conciliar revisers did not consider this elegant little collect good enough for Sunday use, but allowed it onto a feria.

9 July 2016

On June 24 I put the following notice on my blog. If you failed to notice it, and sent comments which have not appeared, this is why.

For a fortnight from June 25 until July 9 I shall not be looking at a computer or moderating Comments. If you feel strongly about the posts which I plan to publish daily during this period, send Comments after July 9; but you might find it simplest just to regard this blog as a NO COMMENT BLOG during this fortnight.

Until 1942, whenever a Holy Pope had to be observed at Mass, the celebrant used one of the two Communia Masses for a Martyr Bishop, or one of the two for a Confessor Bishop; or that for a Doctor of the Church, as might be appropriate. The probability is that most of these texts had themselves evolved in the early centuries of the Roman Rite to be used for Bishops of Rome.

In 1942, Pope Pius XII, or his liturgists, were not so preoccuied with the War that they could find no time to rectify this situation. A new Commune, the Mass Si diligis, was composed to be used on the festivals of Sovereign Pontiffs. The same Mass was used for non-martyrs as for martyrs, except for the addition in the prayers of the words "(and Martyr)". It was, apparently, more significant that a man was a Pope than that he was a martyr. More interestingly still, there could be an implication that a Pope was sacramentally something more than a Bishop: which would contradict the ancient and ecumenical verity that there are but three orders of Sacramental Ministry in Christ's Church: Deacons; Presbyters; and Bishops. As Mascall wisely pointed out "whereas the episcopate is a sacramental function of the Church, which is imparted by the sacramental act of consecration, the Papacy is a juridical and administrative one, which is imparted by the administrative act of election". This unhappy mistake, that the Pope is something other than simply a Bishop (in this case, of the Petrine See of Rome), has raised its silly head during this last year in the idea that, somehow or other, something of the Papacy continued to be present in Benedict XVI after his abdication.

But most interesting of all, in the 1942 Mass Si diligis it was appointed that the Praefatio Apostolorum should be used.

Happily, the doctrinal impropriety of this last detail was understood even within the Pontificate of Pius XII, and the Praefatio Communis was soon substituted. But I find it a significant indication of the spirit of the times that such an indecent provision could have been made at all.

8 July 2016

Fr Eric Mascall interestingly pointed out that the article 'POPE' in Addis's and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary did at one point in its history ... mutate. Here is a passage from the edition of 1905:

It must not be supposed for a moment that the Pope is an absolute monarch. He cannot ... annul the constitution of the Church ordained by Christ. His power of definition is limited by a multitude of previous definitions due to his predecessors, to the councils, to the ordinary exercise of the Church's magisterium through the pastors united to the Holy See. If the Pope obstinately rejected an article of faith which had already been proposed by the Church, and to which the Pope owes allegiance as much as the simplest of the faithful, he might be judged and replaced. 'It has always been maintained', says F. Ryder ... 'that for heresy the Church may judge the Pope, because, as most maintain, by heresy he ceases to be pope'. Bellarmine and Turrecremata maintain that he would cease to be Pope ipso facto; Cajetan and John of St Thomas require formal deposition.

The last three sentences, which I have rendered into italic type, were omitted by the 1951 edition.
Apparently, this passage gave no offence, seemed in no way problematic, in the quarter-century after Vatican I had, under the presidency of B Pio Nono, defined the Primacy of the Roman Pontiff and his Infallibility. It is interesting to note that it had become too dangerous ... or tactless? ... to reprint it in the pontificate of Pius XII.

It is sometimes felt that the 'problem' of the Papacy has something to do with the Decrees of Vatican I. I have never believed this to be so. It was in the middle of the twentieth century, under Pius XII, that inflated views of the Papacy reached a dangerous pitch. And, as Joseph Ratzinger pointed out, it was in the years after the Council that the erroneous view spread that "a pope could do anything". And now, under Papa Bergoglio, the disease has become even more acute.

I shall give you later a liturgical example of the same problem from this same pontificate of Pius XII.

4 July 2016

There are 25 Sundays between Trinity Sunday and Advent in the ORDINARIATE MISSAL ( O ... reproducing the texts of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which in turn derived them from the Sarum and other North European Uses). In the Tridentine Missal, they are 24. But in T, the first Collect of the series is assigned to Trinity Sunday itself, where it is used as a commemoration at the Mass of the Trinity and then in ferial masses during the week. In O, it is moved to the First Sunday after Trinity, which means that in effect the Trinity itself has an Octave (this disposition continues in CW, Common Worship); presumably, ferial masses in the following week are in white vestments. This also means that T is a Sunday ahead of O. But T also omits one of this ancient series of collects, the formula represented by O Trinity III (here is the original Latin of that prayer: Deprecationem nostram, qs, Dne, benignus exaudi: et quibus supplicandi praestas affectum, tribue defensionis auxilium). Because of this omission, for the rest of the year T is two Sundays ahead of O. (In what follows I shall exclude from consideration the Excita collect of the last Sunday before Advent, which, because of the imposition of Christ the King on this day, has its own problems).

CW restored, after the aberrations of the Alternative Service Book, the enumeration of the Sundays after Trinity (except that it terminates them before Advent so as to have a pre-Advent season concentrating on themes of the Kingdom and, optionally, in red vestments). CW also restores some of the old collects, and even allows them to occupy the same Sundays as in O. These collects are Trinity 1,4,6,7,10,11,12,19,21.

B (Bugnini) used some of the old series of collects; but, because of the invention of a novel 34-week tempus per annum, these survivors are all mixed up and only by very occasional coincidences will they fall upon their old Sundays. The collects thus preserved in B are the collects which, in O, are attached to the following Sundays after Trinity: 1,2,4,5,6,7,8,11,12,13,14,17,20. This is four more than CW. What I find interesting is that the taste of the CW committee and that of the B group did not always coincide. In six cases it did; but CW rather liked three which B despised; B liked seven which did not make the CW cut. (B did also incorporate into its new set a couple of collects which had originally lived After Easter but which were not 'paschal' enough in theme for the B peculiar eccentricity of treating all of the fifty days as the Easter Octave.)

The evidence supports the suspicion that these modern committee, in each communion, although working at around the same time and having many of the same presuppositions, did their picking and choosing and suppressing for the most part on the basis of pure personal whimsy, probably connected with which sides of their beds they had got out of.

2 July 2016

A friend linked me to an item in the Grauniad ... at which point I should pause to instruct non-British readers that the Guardian, the paper of the English liberal and libertine and laiciste elite, has traditionally been so full of misprints and errors that it is commonly and contemptuously called the Grauniad.The item in question informed us that in the Catholic Church Deacons can say Mass.
It isn't only the Grauniad which treats 'religious news' with such contempt that they use writers who lack the faintest idea what they are talking about. The practice is common. It makes me reflect "Presumably the people who write on Economics/Politics/Science/Music/Drama/History/Sport in this newspaper are also just as pathetically ignorant about the subjects they handle".

Probably, however, this is not always the case. The phenomenon may rather be the product of a contempt for 'religion' so profound that it seems natural to editors to ask ignorant half-wits to write about it.

It reminds me of an occasion while I was still teaching, when I had a row with some woman who ran the GCSE 'Religious Studies' examination about the content of the papers, the marking schemes, and the conceptual assumptions. She rendered me speechless by saying "I think you have to realise that in pretty well all schools 'Religious Studies' is taught by anybody who happens to have a light timetable".

1 July 2016

How very ruthless of the post-Conciliar 'reforms': Westminster Cathedral, overnight, lost its Patronal Festival when the 'reformers' reduced July 1 to a feria on the flippant grounds that the Precious Blood would get a perfectly adequate 'covering' by being merely added to the title of Corpus Christi. Thus a nice piece of Pius IX liturgy disappeared: the memorial he placed on the calendar to commemorate his return to the City after the Roman Revolution of 1848. There is nothing vulgar, incidentally, about doing that sort of thing to the calendar, or, if there is, it is simply the vulgarity of an incarnational religion. Byzantine calendars are peppered with such observances related to events in Christian history.

Incidentally, on the same occasion Pius IX also raised our Lady's Visitation from a Greater Double to a Double of the Second Class. Urban VI had fitted that festivity onto July 2 as a prayer for Unity. It was the first day available after the Octave of S John, and had long been, among Byzantines, the Feast of the Deposition of the Protecting Robe of the Theotokos in the great Basilica of Blachernae in Constantinople. All that, even the Ecumenical relevance of it, was treated as so much extravagance to be shovelled away.

It was the reforms of Pius X that had shifted the Precious Blood off the First Sunday in July, Pius IX's date, onto July 1. It was felt, in my view rightly, that too many of the old Roman Sunday Masses were unused on their Sundays year after year because of so many feasts permanently anchored on "the xth Sunday of such-a-month". Pius X's change did not, of course, mean that the Precious Blood never fell upon a Sunday; it meant that it only fell on a Sunday once every six or seven years. If a Festum is allowed to supersede a green Sunday, that gives it an occasional Sunday outing ... and isn't that the right balance?

Fr John Hunwicke

was for nearly three decades at Lancing College; where he taught Latin and Greek language and literature, was Head of Theology, and Assistant Chaplain. He has served three curacies, been a Parish Priest, and Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. Since 2011, he has been in full communion with the See of S Peter. The opinions expressed on this Blog are not asserted as being those of the Magisterium of the Church, but as the writer's opinions as a private individual. Nevertheless, the writer strives, hopes, and prays that the views he expresses are conformable with and supportive of the Magisterium. In this blog, the letters PF stand for Pope Francis.